No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Review Article
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2017
Abstract
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
- Type
- Book Reviews and Notes
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society of International Law 1986
References
* The bulk of this review article was written by Professor Cynthia C. Lichtenstein, who speaks in the first person. Professor Herbert Lazerow contributed the section on volume V.
1 Chayes, A., Ehrlich, T. & Lowenfeld, A., International Legal Process (2 vols., 1968)Google Scholar.
2 Restatement (Second) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States §2 (1965). The Restatement defined the law it was restating as comprising international law as traditionally understood plus that part of U.S. municipal law which gives effect to rules of international law or involves matters of significant concern to U.S. foreign relations. The paraphrase of the Restatement’s definition is taken from Leigh, Atkeson, Due Process in the Emerging Foreign Relations Law of the United States , 21 Bus. Law. 853, 853 n.1 (1966)Google Scholar.
3 Katz, M. & Brewster, K. Jr ., The Law of International Transactions and Relations: Cases and Materials (1960)Google Scholar.
4 Fulda, C. & Schwartz, W., Cases and Materials on the Regulation of International Trade and Investment (1970)Google Scholar.
5 A volume in the West Nutshell series on International Business Transactions in a Nutshell by Donald T. Wilson was published in 1981, and a second edition in 1984, but Nutshells are generally used only as supplements. In January 1986, a new casebook, Folsom, Gordon and Spanogle, International Business Transactions: A Problem-Oriented Coursebook, was circulated to law teachers. A cursory glance suggests that the book is very different from the Lowenfeld series and may not appeal to the same group of teachers; Folsom, Gordon and Spanogle covers much more territory (in far less detail) and gives students excerpts from secondary materials (law review articles) as fodder for the “problems.” The result will be, I think, to raise a number of issues for students that they should begin to think about if in practice they deal with the particular kind of problem; but the book will not plunge the students, as do Lowenfeld’s extensive document sections, into the very stuff of practice. Professors Murphy and Swann are understood to be preparing another transaction casebook.
6 Steiner, H. & Vagts, D., Transnational Legal Problems (2d ed. 1976)Google Scholar. Indeed, the “economic” portions of the book, the only ones I have worked with, are excellent. When I first began to teach international economic law, I shamelessly excerpted from the book the introduction to the GATT and a trade problem.
7 Steiner, H. & Vagts, D., Transnational Legal Problems (3d ed. 1986)Google Scholar appeared in January; the separate coursebook, Vagts, D., Transnational Business Problems , appeared in March 1986 Google Scholar.
8 Chayes, Ehrlich & Lowenfeld, supra note 1.
9 Lowenfeld, , On Teaching International Economic Transactions , Matthew Bender Law School Report, November 1984, at 1 Google Scholar.
10 Leigh, & Atkeson, , Due Process in the Emerging Foreign Relations Law of the United States , 21 Bus. Law. 853, 857 (1966)Google Scholar.
11 Chayes, Ehrlich & Lowenfeld, supra note 1.
12 Leigh & Atkeson, supra note 10, and 22 Bus. Law. 3 (1966).
13 Leigh & Atkeson, supra note 10, at 853.
14 Of course, I recognize that most professors who label their courses “international business transactions” are aware that the dichotomy between public and private law is false; they are equally aware of the necessity for plunging their students into the use of the primary sources in the field—the municipal law and the “administrative” law of international organizations. I suspect that part of the reason for the dearth of casebooks in the field is that most professors make up business–planning problems for their students and then have them utilize the library in planning to advise the private client. Lowenfeld achieves the result with self–contained resource materials by having six volumes, each with extensive “document” sections, only two to three of which can be covered in a normal semester.
15 Volume I in the series, International Private Trade, is more like an ordinary casebook than any of the others and so will be discussed separately. Volume V, the only volume in the series not prepared by Professor, Lowenfeld, Tax Aspects of International Transactions (2d ed. 1984)Google Scholar by David Tillinghast, is also the only one I have never used.
16 This example is Lowenfeld’s from his essay for Matthew Bender, note 9 supra.
17 After the attempted imposition of export controls on French and English rotors for the Russian gas pipeline, my students requested a unit on trade controls and we used volume III, rather than doing a unit on international management of global resources (the seabed, space, the moon and Antarctica) based on unpublished materials of my own that follow the Lowenfeld format.
18 Taking students slowly through the Eximbank loan agreement contained in the Chilean portion amounts to a crash course in bank-lending documentation. A footnote description of the London copper exchange is also the best quick description I have read anywhere of a commodities market and forward purchases for hedging purposes. Even when I do not teach the volume on private investment, I use the footnote on the copper exchange to help students understand the currency markets for their work in the volume on The International Monetary System.
19 Perhaps the third edition of this volume will catch us up on these issues (and many others, including the controversy over the wording of the Restatement (Revised)) in the area of realization on expropriated foreign investment.
20 It could, of course, be supplemented with the excellent materials on East–West trade from volume III, Trade Controls for Political Ends, but the focus of those materials is not on how trade with nonmarket economies fits into the GATT system, but on the impact of politics on trade law.
21 Once, before the U.S. international trade legislation began to be the work of a specialized bar and to require teaching time, 1 taught the mimeographed version of volume VI, first edition, together with Lowenfeld’s mimeographed updating of the chapter from the original International Legal Process casebook, supra note 1, on the International Coffee Agreement. This combination—with its look at international commodity agreements—was a springboard into more general discussion of Third World issues in the international trading system and still left time in the semester to utilize the first edition of The International Monetary System. Today, apart from the material on Chile in International Private Investment, there is nothing in the International Economic Law series that lends itself easily to integration into the course on Third World or development issues. Often, students can be encouraged to take the perspective of the debtor nations if the course utilizes a seminar format and treats the debt crisis. Nevertheless, teachers here are on their own unless Oscar Schachter of Columbia or Robert Meagher of Fletcher can be persuaded to part with mimeographed materials.
22 There is, however, in volume IV a separate chapter devoted to “monetary” law as it affects private transactions.